After Hours | Wild West Zombies Walk Into a Burlesque Show

For several years, the artist Marianne Vitale has been making rugged sculptures from repurposed materials that walk a line between critique and chic. On one hand, her bridges, structures, train-track crossings and headstones serve as a mournful meditation on the disappearance of the old frontier America; on the other, they resemble the kinds of old-timey, artisanal home furnishings sold in hipster meccas like Brooklyn and Silver Lake.

That same uneasy duality was on display Wednesday night at a warehouse-workshop in Long Island City, Queens, during the opening of Vitale’s sumptuous Performa commission, “The Missing Book of Spurs,” a series of vignettes that Vitale and her co-conspirators will enact again tonight and tomorrow. The show begins by thrusting the audience into a dreamlike, dystopian Wild West saloon/whorehouse panorama that manifests many currently trendy motifs: zombies, burlesque, 19th-centuryism and arty grossness. Disheveled bordello vamps with garters and kohl-smudged eyes bump and grind like streetwalkers on the nod, recalling the punk-Weimar Broadway restaging of “Cabaret” from 1998. A shambolic score that sounds like a mash-up of Motörhead, Grizzly Bear and Ennio Morricone enhances the noir-frontier atmosphere. As the show progresses, we meet various characters: a woman in a pompadour and Revolutionary War-era finery who detachedly sips a martini; a barkeep who assails the audience with Civil War-era auction-barker gibberish; an Indian witch doctor who enters and does a hilarious dance with a fat, shirtless Hells Angels type, whose unmanicured genitalia is on hilarious display; a ditzy, druggy ephebe in a dirty prairie dress who screams profanities at the doctor. It ends with these arch hipster zombies calling up the audience to dance.

Asked afterward what the show was all about, Vitale said, “We’re just trying to have some fun and stay off the street!” In that regard, the piece succeeds. A barkeep in the anteroom even pours glasses of whiskey before the performance. Throughout the show, the auctioneer-barkeep and the brothel tarts shout out the names of various states: “Arkansas! Texas! Alabama! Georgia!” Are they calling out red states for a reason? Vitale’s show didn’t show its hand. But it sure was fun to look at.

“The Missing Book of Spurs” will be performed again on Nov. 22 and Nov. 23, at 5-01 46th Road, Long Island City, Queens; $20; 13.performa-arts.org.